Laura Del Rivo has been living in the
Portobello Road area for over fifty years. She still runs a market stall. In
2011 Five Leaves reissued her debut novel, The
Furnished Room (1961; filmed by Michael Winner in 1963 as West 11): ‘an evocative taste of
black-coffee blues ... a perfect encapsulation of that shady, shifting Ladbroke
Grove on the cusp of profound social change’ (Guardian). She has a story in the new Salt anthology of Best British Short Stories 2013, and a
new collection will be published by Holland Park Press this year.

Cathi Unsworth is also a local author. Her
novels include Bad Penny Blues, an
exploration of the unsolved ‘Jack the Stripper’ murders of eight working girls
in along the Thames in the1960s, The Not
Knowing and The Singer (‘Cathi
Unsworth has written the Great Punk Novel’ – David Peace). Her most recent
novel, The Weirdo, was published in
paperback in June. In the book of essays on London
Fictions (Five Leaves, 2013) she writes on Lynne Reid Banks’s The L-Shaped Room (1960).